AIYA Links: 12 July
Selamat siang dan Ramadhan Kareem! We at AIYA would like to wish all of our Muslim friends and their families a safe and happy month of Ramadhan.
Here are our weekly highlights of news and opinions on Indonesia and the Australia-Indonesia relationship to inform and entertain you over the weekend.
News and links
- This time last week, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was enjoying some Indonesian hospitality during his visit to Jakarta and Bogor. The Prime Minister’s Press Office has a transcript of the PM’s address to a business breakfast in Jakarta on 5 July, and of his remarks at a joint media conference with President Yudhoyono at Istana Bogor on the same day.
- PM Rudd also used his visit to launch the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Indonesia Country Strategy as a follow-up to the Government’s recent Australia in the Asian Century white paper.
- Transparency International has released its Global Corruption Barometer for 2013, a worldwide survey of public perceptions of corruption. It contains some pretty dispiriting results from its Indonesian respondents.
- Australian PhD student Brooke Nolan takes a look at one of the peculiarities of Indonesian life, panas dalam—the mystery illness which ‘can kill, but…can also be cured by a phone call’.
- This Jakarta Post story highlights one of the seemingly endless paradoxes of Indonesia’s economic development: the country is at once facing problems of childhood malnutrition and childhood obesity.
Events
- For those in Melbourne: Assoc. Prof. Simon Butt and Prof. Howard Dick of the University of Melbourne will speak at an evening seminar on Wednesday 17 July, pithily titled Is Indonesia as Corrupt as Most People Believe and Is It Getting Worse?—sure to be a great discussion on a critically important issue for Indonesia.
- Don’t forget: applications to be part of the inaugural Conference of Australian and Indonesian Youth (CAUSINDY) in Canberra on 17-20 October are still open. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to meet with academics, business leaders and other young people at the forefront of building people-to-people relationships between Australia and Indonesia.